A day after Musk deployed his latest strategy for Twitter to combat “extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation”—limiting how many tweets a user read in a day—German rival Mastodon is reaping the benefits. How? An influx of fed-up Twitter users.

Mastodon’s active user base shot up by 110,000 within a day after Twitter set daily post reading quotas for users.

“Looks like Mastodon’s active user base has increased by 110K (110,000) over the last day. Not bad,” Eugen Rochko, Founder, CEO and lead developer of Mastodon, wrote on the platform.

This is not the first time that Twitter users have flocked to Mastodon, a social network founded in 2016, since Musk’s $44 billion takeover in October last year. Monthly active users had surged from 300,000 to a whopping 2.5 million between October and November with a significant number of “journalists, political figures, writers, actors and organizations” jumping ship, Rochko had said in a blog post.

Threatened by this shift, Musk had–in December last year–banned links to Mastodon on Twitter, and suspended users who posted their Mastodon handles, including Mastodon’s official account, according to The Guardian. However, after facing public backlash, Musk backpedaled, labeling this ban a "mistake" during a Twitter Spaces livestream.

About Mastodon: Mastodon operates as a decentralized social media network, comprising independent servers, instead of a single website, all with their own moderators and users. Through the open protocol ActivityPub, users can interact with each other's posts or "toots."

The broader network that Mastodon is part of, called the "fediverse," allows various social media services to connect via ActivityPub, preventing any single app from monopolizing the platform. Users can sign up for a specific server—operated by volunteers, who often rely on donations through Patreon or personal funds—or set up and run their own Mastodon server, as it is an open-source platform. Additionally, since this is run by volunteers, all feeds are free of paid-for ads.

Twitter’s woes: Twitter has struggled financially since Musk took over. So far, his leadership has been chaotic, marked by advertisers leaving, a series of layoffs and many product and organizational changes.

Monetisation efforts with subscription-based models like Twitter Blue—charging $8 monthly for the blue tick—have proven unsuccessful, as less than 1% of the platform's active users have signed up for this service, with the recent speculation that the limited access to tweets might be yet another move to boost subscription numbers.